by Dana Czapnik
“Vi,” I yell over the music.
She jumps and nearly spills her coffee.
“You scared me—I was in my own world.”
“It’s where I expect to find you.”
“If I stay long enough, eventually I’ll get squatter’s rights. Come in.” She bends over the stereo to turn the volume down. I leave my sneaks by the door with my bag. There’s no rule about shoe removal in her place, but I like the way the floors here feel under my feet. They’re the old hardwood, probably from the turn of the century. The planks are very thin and dark and they’ve each disconnected from their neighbors. It feels like the floor’s shifting under every step. It reminds me of stop-motion animation of waves in the ocean.
Lining the outer edges of the floor are endless stacks of books, which Violet uses as makeshift tables to hold painting supplies. Before I leave, I always skim the stacks and ask her which one I should borrow. Which book is the book I should read right now. Her recommendations are always spot-on. The only pieces of furniture in the room are her bed and her roommate Max’s bed, stashed away behind Japanese screens in their separate corners, and a red velvet couch with chipped gold trim that they rescued from the trash along with a small coffee table covered in candle wax, both of which sit in the center of the expansive room. There is a hollowness present that is oddly comforting. Violet and Max don’t own a computer. Or a television. There isn’t a clock on the wall or an alarm. There is no kitchen table. There is no practicality. This world I enter, whenever I visit, is a place that exists outside the lines of my life. The only piece of technology in the loft is a stereo because Violet wouldn’t dream of living without music. She says it’s the highest form of art because it’s the only one we created for the sole purpose of beauty. Painting and sculpture and poetry and prose derived from wanting to record our history. But music—music is wordless feeling.
I close the door. On the apartment side, the door is a haphazard collage of life. Slapdash poetry. Album liner notes. Pictures of roadkill. Shopping lists: “limes, tofu, tinfoil, lighter fluid.” A drawing of Violet on a white napkin, done in ballpoint pen, snakes slithering out of every orifice, “SELF PORTRAIT” written at the top. A random selection of those postcards you get for free in bar bathrooms. Phone numbers for electricians and plumbers. Torn-out pages from magazines and newspapers with bylines circled, “cocksucker” or “This person sucks cock” or a drawing of someone sucking cock scribbled underneath the name. A postcard of that famous John Lennon picture where he’s wearing the New York City T-shirt, but someone’s written over it in scraggly handwriting: “DISCO IS DEAF.” Ripped pieces of paper with names and numbers on them. “Slick Rick 713-9791 always has dirty glasses but can dance and likes to kiss on balconies.” “If Chris calls, tell him blasphemy is a breakfast food. A round of Bloody Marys on me.” “Ray’s Pizza on 1st 762-3429 adds toppings for free.” “Guy from S.O.B.’s, told me I was ravishing, good hair 305-4613 name??” A series of Polaroids of a topless Max with the words “Anything instant is half as good as anything slow” painted on her body. Pages from old Dadaist magazines. A print of The Kiss by Robert Delaunay, a close-up of a man and woman. The man’s face is a cool, calm blue. His eyes are closed. The woman is pale pink, her lips red. Even though we can only see a fraction of their faces—the perspective is thatclose—we can tell her head is thrown back and her body is in his arms. Someone’s written “The way it’s supposed to feel” on it. A photograph of Robert Delaunay’s wife, the artist Sonia Delaunay, with paint all over it and the quote: “I have lived my art.”
“You’ve got those purple bags there, I see. Under your eyes. You’re too young to be so stressed.”
I turn to Violet. “There’s this thing—it’s called college. And I have to apply to it.” I jump on the counter of the kitchenette and take a seat.
“Who says ‘have to’?”
“No one. Everyone.” I look down at my jeans and play with the tattered edge where the seam has been destroyed by being dragged along the pavement. “Let’s not talk about it.”
The truth is that I bombed the analogy section of my SATs last year. Threw my whole score off. Now my college counselor says my options are “a little limited.”
“Listen, can I let you in on a dirty little secret?” Violet asks.
“Of course, those are the best kind.”
“All college is is pretending to like your friends’ a cappella groups, with a heaping side dish of terrible sexual experiences. You’d be better off spending the next four years in a cave reading books.”
Violet walks over to where I’m sitting and opens up a cabinet filled with cartons of American Spirits. She takes out a pack and begins hitting the bottom with her palm, something I’ve seen every smoker do, but I’ve never understood why. Does it actually make a difference in terms of the pleasure derived from smoking, or is it one of those things that all smokers do because all the other smokers do it?
“Kids like you are the American education machine’s bread and butter.” Violet points her unlit cigarette at me. “Children of nouveau riche baby boomer parents who went to City College but want in on the myth of the market-tested degree now that they can afford it.”
“Violet, you went to Bennington, the most expensive school in the country.”
“Right, I speak from experience. After taking your parents’ thirty thou a year for four years, you know what these elite schools do as soon as you graduate?” She fires up a burner on the little stove in the corner and lights up the cigarette, which is quite possibly the only way the stove is ever used in this apartment. “They call you to get you to donate back to them a portion of your tiny salary from the entry-level job you got using your liberal arts degree, which you earned by learning a ton about Shakespeare and poststructuralism and nothing about how to make a buck in late-capitalist America. And you know why they’ll take your measly fifteen dollars—which is all you’ll be able to afford to give them—even though there’s no way that money makes any difference to their bottom line? Because the number of alumni they get to donate money back to them directly contributes to calculating their national ranking. Which plays an enormous part in duping young high school kids like you. So . . . I say don’t take part in the circular farce.”
“You’re so totally right—I am so not applying to college. I’m gonna go home tonight and let my parents know they can keep the money they were planning on spending on my education and instead put it toward my wedding.”
“Go ahead, make fun. You’ll see.”
Here are the three things I want in a school: proximity to Percy, who will be going to Harvard in the fall if he gets in, which he will because of his family name; an amazing astronomy department with an observatory; and hopefully a good basketball team I can play on, but not so good that I’d be riding the bench all four years. Even though I don’t have the best boards, I have straight As from Pendleton. And though I hate it when school administrators use the word “pedigree” like we’re show dogs, the truth is that I’m going to use that Pendleton pedigree as my sail and allow it to take me as far as it will go before it shreds in the wind.
“Any other dirty little secrets for me?”
“There’s no such thing as Santa Claus or soul mates. But you knew that already.” Smoke escapes through Violet’s teeth and nose. “I see in your face you don’t believe me.”
“No, I know Santa Claus is fake.”
She shakes her head. “I wish all the lessons I’ve learned could be transferred to you through osmosis. Unfortunately, you’ll have to learn them on your own, since no one ever learns from anyone else’s experiences. That’s why history always repeats itself.” She claps her hands together. “So did you come here to help me with the hands on this painting or not?”
“I’m here to help.” I jump off my perch on her counter and head over to Violet’s side of the loft, where her various works in progress rest on metal easels and hang haphazardly on the white wall. Her newest is spread out on a
huge canvas that’s stretched taut with large nails. It’s a painting of a woman sitting in the back of a cab, her right arm resting on the door and her forehead pressed against the window, staring out onto the night streets whizzing by. It’s painted in such incredible detail it could be confused for a photograph. Taped up on the wall is a small print of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, though the woman in the painting seems to be modeled more off Violet, except prettier, with finer features, a more delicate physique, and a poof of hair with more logic than her own. Is this how she sees herself, or how she wishes she saw herself?
“She’s naked,” I say.
“Yeah, so?”
“Nobody sits naked in the back of a taxicab unless they’re asking for a disease. It’s like sitting bare-assed on a Port Authority toilet.”
“Well, you can’t get a disease from sitting naked in a cab in a painting. It’s fiction.”
“It’s so different from anything I’ve seen from you before.” I scan all the paintings of strange, abstract female faces for a series called Three-Dimensional Objects. Large-scale, surreal, out of context and out of focus, made up of colorful scattershot shapes and lines. And an unfinished series leaning against the wall: photographs of young, beautiful women behind glass. On the glass, she’s re-created their features in sketches but has added additional details to make them look sandblasted and ravaged by time. You can slide the photos in and out from behind the glass and watch as they age within milliseconds. “What else is there in this life but the story of a ruined face?” she said the last time I was here.
The face on Venus in her new painting is young and perfect but conveys the ruin beneath the surface.
“Last month, some guy pushed me over on the subway as we were both getting onto the car just so he could get a seat.” She dips her brush into some deep blue paint on her palette. “He had no shame, didn’t even apologize or offer to help me up. So I walked up to him and said, ‘It used to be that men and the gods fought wars over beautiful women. Now men push women out of the way to get a seat on the subway.’ He looked up at me and busted out this awful Brooklyn accent and said, ‘Sweethaht, you ain’t no Helen uh Troy.’ ”
“What did you say?”
“I had to laugh! Who woulda thought that guy would get my reference. And the idea hit me. What would the women of Greek and Roman mythology make of twentieth-century New York? After Venus in a cab, I’m doing Helen on the subway, with all the seats taken by fat guys from Brooklyn reading the sports pages. Then Psyche in a phone booth, crying on the phone while a hooker bangs on the door. Maybe Medusa in a hole-in-the-wall bar at 3:00 a.m., nursing a whiskey and feeling misunderstood. Diana catatonic on the couch while three kids blast her with Super Soakers and her husband watches Die Hard on TV. I don’t know, I haven’t quite figured out the rest of them.” Violet puts her hand with the paintbrush in her hair and frowns. She accidentally paints a few strands blue but doesn’t seem to notice. “Max thinks my work is too literal and that I’m not pushing myself enough. She says because we live in a culture that prizes youth and beauty over everything, art has to be ugly to be serious. What do you think?”
“I don’t know if you should take advice from a person whose pièce de résistance is an American flag made out of dildos.”
Violet puts her brush down on the palette, grabs me by my shoulders, and roughly turns me around to face the other side of the apartment, where Max’s latest iteration of Old Glory Hole spans nearly the entire wall.
“My love, do you know how brilliant this is?” she says.
“Um, no.”
“This is a statement. This is the reason she got into the Whitney Biennial. This is what art right now is supposed to be—unlike my stuff. A lost goddess in the back of a taxi? Why can’t I come up with something like this? She’s sold five of them already to private collectors, and Gay Men’s Health Crisis is auctioning off a rainbow-flag one she made with condoms on them for this year’s AIDS Walk. I bet she gets her own show in a major gallery off of this any day now.” Violet plops herself down on the velvet couch and drops the butt of her cigarette into the last sip of her coffee. It makes a soft sizzling sound. All the silver rings on her fingers have tarnished. “Nobody gives a damn about oil on canvas anymore. I have to change my medium.”
“Hey,” I say, “I like your Venuses better than her penises.” I do a little vaudeville dance and pretend to tip my hat. She throws a dusty couch pillow at me and laughs one of her booming laughs, the kind that fills a room. She stares at her painting for a while, then shakes her head. “Whatever. I just gotta be me.” She stands up and points at the couch. “Sit. I need your huge, expressive hands.”
Whenever Violet is having an issue with painting a small human feature, like cuticle moons or an ear or the hairline, I’ll sit for her. I’d say my ears have shown up in at least ten of her paintings. She says they have unpredictable folds.
“I can’t do large installation work like Max. I like faces too much,” she says as she puts brush to canvas. “The human face, if you look at it closely enough, has everything in it. Every color that exists. Shadows and sunlight. As many peaks and valleys as the surface of the earth. Have you ever really looked at your lips in a mirror?”
“I don’t think so.”
“When I started this painting, I found that her lips looked . . . off. Not quite real enough. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I became obsessed. I stared at everyone’s lips. I even went to the library to research lips. If you think about it, lips are the most amazing part of the unclothed body. They’re basically the nipples of the face. Is there any other part of the body where the skin’s pigmentation changes so drastically? Where my painting was off was that beautiful line where the lips meet the skin. Do you know what that’s called?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“It’s called the vermilion border. Isn’t that just stunning? Now I can’t stop looking at people’s lips—how different the vermilion border appears from person to person, from race to race.” Violet turns around to look at me. “I’ve just noticed today that you have a white scar—a small, crooked white line on your lower lip. I hadn’t noticed it before. Is that a basketball injury?”
I lift my finger up to my lip and feel the minuscule indentation. “I wish. It’s actually a stupid story.”
“Tell me. I want to add that scar to the painting, and I can’t add it without the story.”
“There’s this girl in my class, Lauren Moon, who the boys have been in love with since we were toddlers. In the fourth grade, she fell off her bike and split her lip and had to have four stitches. She missed school for a couple days, and while she was gone everyone talked about the destruction of her perfect face. But when she came back, there was something about the stitches—which eventually formed into a white scar—that somehow made her even prettier. It gave her extra . . . I don’t know . . . gravitas, I guess. Mystery? And I thought that if I had a scar like that, people would think I was pretty too. So I started to bite down really hard on my lip to get the same scar. And it worked. I mean, it worked in terms of me successfully giving myself a scar. But the thing I didn’t realize is that you can’t manufacture the kind of imperfections that make you more interesting to look at. Like the women in the Eighties who would use eyeliner to put a mole over their lip to look like Cindy Crawford or Madonna. It’s not pretty if it’s fake. The reason the scar looked so good on Lauren is because she earned it.”
“You earned yours too. We all earn our scars. Even if they’re self-inflicted.”
The door slams on the other end of the studio like a bomb detonating, and Max explodes into the room, throwing her keys on the stove. Metal crashes on metal. She dumps about thirty cartons of Pepto-Bismol on the floor from about the same number of plastic grocery bags.
Every time I see Max, I’m always startled by how small she is, because her personality is so huge that by the time I’ve spent more than half an hour with her, I’ve forgotten that she’s a little waif of a per
son. A life-sized Tinker Bell with a bleached-blond pixie cut. She’s wearing black-and-white Zubaz pants with Birkenstocks and a children’s Barney T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, revealing a tattoo of the words “West Texas” written in blue ink on her tiny left bicep. It looks like it was done in a prison yard.
“What kind of emotional crap is Violet telling you right now? Something about the poetry of scars?” She kicks the pink bottles toward me.
“Whatever, Max.” Violet rolls her eyes.
“I miss the angry, punk-rock girl I used to know. Ever since Shaw’s been back in the picture, you’ve turned into this moony girl who won’t shut up about lips. It’s nauseating.”
“Is that why you need all the Pepto?” I ask.
Max picks a bottle up from the floor, grabs one of Violet’s porcelain platter palettes off a stack of books, and sits down next to me on the couch.
“No. This is for my next project.” Her eyes gleam like she’s a cartoon witch about to concoct a potion. She dumps half a bottle of the Pepto onto the platter and turns to face me. “Were you a Barbie girl?”
“What do you think?”
“No. Okay, well, I was. Hard to believe, but it’s true. My mother was one of the salivating hordes at Kay Bee and Toys ‘R’ Us who’d buy those dolls sitting there encased in plastic, the perfect price point for little girls’ birthday-party gifts.”
“Lucy, would you ever guess that this girl was a cheerleader her freshman year of high school?” Violet says.
“No way.”
“Yes, and then I heard the Cure, okay? We can’t all be born knowing who we are. What about you, New Jersey?” She looks up at Violet. “Did Gloria Steinem let you play with Barbies in your gender-neutral bedroom?”